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THE TIKTOK BAN WON’T HELP  
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Siddharth Suhas Shanbhag
January 18, 2025
Jacobin
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_ The TikTok ban is about US tech hegemony, not national security or
protecting Americans’ data, which homegrown social media companies
make a business of collecting and selling. _

A Supreme Court ruling has set the stage for TikTok to potentially go
offline as soon as Sunday. , Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images

 

After today’s Supreme Court ruling
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TikTok is set to be banned in the United States on Sunday following
the refusal of its parent Chinese company, ByteDance, to sell the
social media app to a US company.

In a digital landscape dominated by social media apps owned and
curated by US companies, TikTok is the most successful app to have
come out of China. It has over 170 million American users — most of
the US population — largely young people, and also a significant
number of businesses that use the app to advertise their wares.

Whether the ban will actually occur remains anyone’s guess. Joe
Biden has said that his administration doesn’t plan to implement it
during its last days in the White House, and Donald Trump, who had
originally tried to ban the app during his first term, later vowed to
save it (after accumulating some fourteen million followers on the
platform).

The court, in its decision to uphold the Protecting Americans from
Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, signed by President Joe
Biden last spring, stated that national security concerns outweigh the
potentially harmful consequences to freedom of speech. The justices
were sympathetic to the US government’s argument that, since
ByteDance is a Chinese company, there are potentially serious risks
that arise from the possibility that it will be required to share data
about its American users with the Chinese government. There were also
risks, the justices affirmed, that the Chinese government could
influence the quality of the content circulating on the app, to the
detriment of the interests of American citizens.

But the fact that the government has refused to act in a similarly
protective manner in relation to US-owned social media apps is telling
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Regulation is desperately needed to protect Americans’ data and
protect free speech on social media. If the law was really about data
protection or national security, it would set industry-wide standards,
but the real motive behind it is to preserve US tech dominance.

A Framework for Global Electronic Dominance

We have all learned a great deal about how social media apps and their
algorithms operate over the last few years, particularly since the
Cambridge Analytica affair
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came to light in 2018. Cambridge Analytica was a British political
consulting firm that was found to have used data gathered by Facebook
to influence voters in the US presidential election of 2016 as well as
the Brexit vote in Britain in the same year. An innocuous
questionnaire presented to Facebook users surreptitiously gathered
personal data from their profiles as well as the profiles of all their
Facebook friends, which was then sold to the Trump campaign and the
campaign in favor of Brexit by Cambridge Analytica, without the
consent of the Facebook users who had been targeted. Some eight-seven
million Facebook users were affected.

There’s a reason why Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is worth
well over a trillion dollars today. Advertising on the platform has
become a high-precision concern that can target users with very
particular interests at the exact time when they need the products or
services being marketed. And as the Cambridge Analytica affair proved,
political preferences are not beyond the reach of those algorithms
either. The scandal opened the eyes of lawmakers in Congress to just
how effective social media apps can be in influencing the behaviors of
their users. Those complex algorithms can be tweaked in such a way as
to promote a certain point of view or to suppress another without the
users having the slightest clue that their behavior is being
manipulated in this way.

Most of the work in propagating views of one kind or another online is
done by the users themselves. As we post content, share other
people’s posts, and comment on posts that are of interest to us, we
provide social media companies with data that they can use to serve us
more content or essentially sell to advertisers. By tweaking the
algorithms, administrators can control the reach of the desired
content to specific groups of users based on their demographic
information and online behavior. This is our rudimentary understanding
of how things operate in the social media universe. The reality of
just how pervasive the control of our behavior by these apps could be
is still being uncovered.

It’s already palpable to users of X/Twitter that Elon Musk has been
indulging in such tweaking of the algorithms to propagate his own
political views on that platform since he purchased it a couple years
ago. Musk is now a senior advisor to Donald Trump and is set to play a
pivotal role in the incoming administration as colead of DOGE, the
Department of Government Efficiency. Thus the lines between private
and public control over the content flowing through major social media
apps appear blurrier than ever in the United States. The truth is,
however, that those lines were never really sharply defined
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in the first place.

In _The Age of Surveillance Capitalism_, Shoshana Zuboff describes how
Bill Clinton and Al Gore, in their 1997 white paper entitled “A
Framework for Global Electronic Commerce
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decided on behalf of all American citizens that democracy would stand
down in favor of the private control of information on the internet.
Effectively, the keys to the digital information space that was being
constructed online were handed over to private corporations, which
were then required to make all of that information available to the
American surveillance agencies upon request. This gave the NSA, FBI,
and the CIA access to our data whenever they needed it.

Zuboff states that, in 1986, only 1 percent of our vital information
was stored digitally. By the year 2000, that share had risen to 25
percent, and by 2013, 100 percent of our most vital information was
stored digitally, and the intelligence agencies had access to it via
the major private corporations, which had been granted permission to
gather it and even sell it. Today we live in a world where our mobile
phones and our cars and many of the appliances in our homes and our
offices gather data about our behavioral patterns, and the innocuous
apps that we use store that data make it available to interested
parties for a price. That’s how the telemarketers from the banks
know when you may be looking for a new loan, and how the insurance
company knows when you may be ready to switch your health insurance to
a new provider.

It all began when Google realized it had on its hands what Zuboff
calls a “behavioral surplus,” harvested data that goes beyond what
is required to improve the quality of the company’s services. Then
came Facebook, which began to harvest our data in even more intimate
detail. These were the first tech companies to have developed
“instrumentarian power,” the ability to modify user behavior at
scale without any overt coercion. They were using techniques based on
subtle cues like nudges and feedback loops and recommendation
algorithms. As these companies became more and more successful at
coercing users with ads and targeted content, the global ecosystem of
the apps grew ever larger. Today advertisers are more likely to place
their ads on Facebook than on television or radio, because the
internet is king.

What we have today is an entire economic system built on this
instrumentarian power. If capitalism is a system built on the
production and sale of commodities, our personal data is one of the
most sought out. It is mined and refined just like oil, and it has
become almost as valuable. The ability to influence behavior
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at such an enormous scale is coveted by all sorts of third parties,
particularly e-commerce businesses and political campaigns. So the US
Supreme Court may well have reason to fear that TikTok could grant a
powerful few undue influence over the behavior of many American
citizens, even if politicians’ claims that TikTok — a private
company — is funneling user data to the Chinese government are
misguided. If the Chinese wanted the data, they could just buy it.
Rather, the Supreme Court has decided that the free speech of American
users of TikTok is a small price to pay to protect US tech hegemony,
not Americans’ data or privacy.

Profits Over People

This is substantiated by the astonishing lack of government oversight
of homegrown apps and tech companies. The Supreme Court obviously has
few qualms about the undue power to manipulate the behavior of
citizens that US policy has granted to corporations, private players
who have no concern for the greater interests of their users beyond
their ability to target them with ads and political messaging.

The American Journal of Epidemiology conducted a five-thousand-person
study
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that found that higher social media use correlated with self-reported
declines in mental and physical health and life satisfaction. An
internal report from Facebook found that 64 percent
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of the people who joined extremist groups on Facebook did so because
the algorithms steered them there. What would it take to limit social
media’s antisocial tendencies?
Regulation could compel social media companies to protect our data and
our right to privacy, but platforms designed to favor profit
maximization over human well-being will always run counter to these
goals, whether operated by companies in the United States, China, or
elsewhere. The TikTok ban, if it actually happens, shows that
government is at least capable of intervening forcefully. But that it
is motivated by US economic hegemony, and during a time when tech
capitalists and government in the United States have never been more
imbricated, indicates that we can’t expect meaningful industry-wide
intervention for the many anytime soon.

Siddharth Suhas Shanbhag is a freelance journalist based in Bangalore,
India.

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